UNLIKE previous Alabama governors, Robert J. Bentley is not a fount of oratory. Nor is he a champion of “kinder and gentler.” His dyspeptic refusal to accept federal funds for Medicaid expansion, in a state where more than one million of 4.8 million residents depend on the program, betokens a stunning indifference to the Hippocratic oath. (The governor is a dermatologist.) Yet Mr. Bentley recently took a page from the Obama playbook and used a surprise executive order to remove four Confederate flags from the Alabama Capitol grounds, not far from the very spot where Jefferson Davis was sworn in...

One evening several years ago, John Mary was up late reading a local blog when he came across a comment from a man who said he lived in Gulfport, Mississippi. The commenter had been watching his kid mow a relative’s lawn, he wrote, when a couple approached the boy and asked if he could cut their grass sometime. The commenter recognized the man. It was Senator Thad Cochran, he wrote, and the woman with him sure as hell wasn’t his wife. The gossip stuck with Mary, a 62-year-old from Hattiesburg, about 70 miles north of Gulfport. But he didn’t think...

Horne v. Department of Agriculture.decision is a big win for those of us who try to make a living in Ag Any net proceeds the raisin growers receive from the sale of the reserve raisins goes to the amount of compensation they have received for that taking. It does not mean that the raisins have not been appropriated for government use, nor can the government make raisin growers relinquish their property without just compensation as a condition for selling in interstate commerce. This is a major blow to government's program of trying to boost prices by keeping crops off the...

Long before he was caught lying about his chopper being forced down by enemy fire in Iraq, Brian Williams boasted how he bravely rescued a terrified puppy from a house fire. Or maybe it was two puppies. The truth-challenged NBC anchor told dueling versions of his supposed heroics as a teenage volunteer firefighter with the Old Village Fire Company in Middletown, NJ. In October 2011, Williams waxed rhapsodic about how his dad took him to fires. Â“I remember one such house fire .â€‰.â€‰. conducting a search on my hands and knees, when I felt something warm, squishy and furry on...

Around 2 a.m. on December 12, four students approached the apartment of Omar Mahmood, a Muslim student at the University of Michigan, who had recently published a column in a school newspaper about his perspective as a minority on campus. The students, who were recorded on a building surveillance camera wearing baggy hooded sweatshirts to hide their identity, littered Mahmood’s doorway with copies of his column, scrawled with messages like “You scum embarrass us,” “Shut the **** up,” and “DO YOU EVEN GO HERE?! LEAVE!!” They posted a picture of a demon and splattered eggs. This might appear to be...

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Friday barred local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without proving that a crime occurred. Holder’s action represents the most sweeping check on police power to confiscate personal property since the seizures began three decades ago as part of the war on drugs. Since 2008, thousands of local and state police agencies have made more than 55,000 seizures of cash and property worth $3 billion under a civil asset forfeiture program at the Justice Department called Equitable Sharing. The program has enabled local and state...

In response to a wave of bad behavior by the popular ride-sharing service Uber—with one executive suggesting digging up dirt on journalists who write negative articles about the company—many advocated a switch to Uber’s competitor, Lyft. But this approach ignores the fact that Uber’s abuses are baked into how “sharing” companies operate, a way of doing business that is shared by its competitors. More important, it misses a way to transform these companies that is right there in front of us: by socializing ownership among their workers. Cutting through the marketing BS of Silicon Valley is a good goal for...

How does one explain liberals’ relentless obsession with race? Democrats and left-wing activists clutch the notion of racism as America’s defining characteristic just as streetcorner drunks cling to their fifths of cheap booze. No matter what, neither community can unhand those bottles. In fact, this debilitating liberal addiction deserves a name: raceaholism. Advertisement Raceaholics like President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, New York mayor Bill de Blasio, overexposed circus barker Al Sharpton, Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson, their allies, and their media enablers cannot stop talking about race. They refract almost every issue through that prism. According to them,...

Even at this late date in the Obama presidency, there is no surer way to elicit paranoid whispers or armchair psychoanalysis from Democrats than to mention the name Valerie Jarrett. Party operatives, administration officials—they are shocked by her sheer longevity and marvel at her influence. When I asked a longtime source who left the Obama White House years ago for his impressions of Jarrett, he confessed that he was too fearful to speak with me, even off the record. This is not as irrational as it sounds. Obama has said he consults Jarrett on every major decision, something current and...

Last week’s People's Climate March drew 400,000 people onto the streets of Manhattan and a great deal of international attention to a subject of dire urgency. But some were skeptical about the event’s overall significance. “The march slogan was, ‘to change everything, we need everyone,’ which is telling, because it won’t change everything, because it didn’t include everyone,” wrote David Roberts of Grist. “Specifically, it won’t change American politics because it didn’t include conservatives.” True enough. If there weren’t such a stark divide between American conservatives and almost everyone else on the question of the existence and importance of climate...

Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History by Richard J. Evans (Brandeis University Press) As everyone knows, the supreme court â€¨ruled sixÂ–three for Al Gore in the great dispute over the Florida recount in 2000. As everyone also knows, Gore emerged as the ultimate victor in that recount, and with his poetic and moving inauguration address he managed to unify a badly divided nation. For a long period, the Gore years continued the peace and prosperity established under President Clinton, punctuated by the successful prevention of an apparent terrorist plot in 2001, by the enactment of health care reform in 2003 (mocked...

It’s interesting that the director of the richest oeuvre of black films in the history of the medium doesn’t understand what the Civil Rights revolution was for. In his expletive-laced comments about the gentrification of Fort Greene during an interview at the Pratt Institute, Spike Lee seemed to think that what we Overcame for was to be grouchy bigots. Basically, black people are getting paid more money than they’ve ever seen in their lives for their houses, and a once sketchy neighborhood is now quiet and pleasant. And this is a bad thing… why? Lee seems to think it’s somehow...

I once shared a car to the airport with a French MEP, a member of the Front National (FN). He spoke that very correct French which, across the Channel, serves in place of accent as a social signifier. He casually mentioned that the Holocaust couldn’t have happened, at least not on the scale claimed: the volume of the ovens, he creepily explained, was insufficient. The European Parliament has always had its fair share of extremists, eccentrics and outright, drooling loons. With the FN then polling at 6 per cent, there seemed no need to treat any of its MEPs seriously,...

There goes the neighborhood! Motor homes have invaded the Upper West Side, sparking fear in the hearts of residents worried their well-heeled haven could fast be transformed into a low-rent campsite. “Why is this ugly piece of junk here?” demanded area activist Gretchen Berger, referring to the rusted RV that has been stationed at Riverside Drive and 74th Street. “It just sort of creeps me out that somebody is living in a parking space, and this may give rise to other people thinking that it’s a cheap way to live on the Upper West Side, where the rents are high....

People in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico may not be grappling with the botched Obamacare website rollout, but the program could spell disaster for the island, which is facing a financial crisis and where half the population already is dependent on free health insurance, members of the island's medical community warned. Puerto Ricans, who are born U.S. citizens, do not enroll on the healthcare.gov because their government decided not to offer health-insurance exchanges, which offers private plans. Instead, the Affordable Care Act, commonly dubbed Obamacare, has mostly arrived on the island in the form of a $6.3 billion social...

<p>WASHINGTON—All five regulatory agencies put to a vote and approved the Volcker rule on Tuesday, ushering in a new era of tough oversight that drills to the core of Wall Street's profitable markets and trading businesses.</p>
<p>The rule will put in place new hurdles for banks that buy and sell securities on behalf of clients, known as market making, and will restrict compensation arrangements that encourage risky trading. The Fed also approved an extension to give banks until July 2015 to comply with the rule, though firms will be expected to make "good faith" efforts to get into compliance earlier.</p>

The NSA slide that tech experts say Glenn Greenwald misinterpreted. (The Guardian/NSA, US Federal Government.) Glenn Greenwald has posted a response to his critics today, including myself, titled “;On PRISM, Partisanship, and Propaganda”: “In a Nation post yesterday,” he writes, “Rick Perlstein falsely accuses me of not having addressed the questions about the PRISM story.” Actually I didn’t accuse him of not having addressed “the questions,” but instead a single question, which he still does not address: whether, in his claim that corporations have allowed the National Security Agency direct access to their servers, he misunderstands the meaning of...

It's always instructive to see who quickly takes the government's side in a dispute with a whistleblower, and what kind of argumentation they deploy. David Brooks was certainly a predictable candidate. Here's a sampling of a few others: Roger Simon, chief political columnist for Politico, former White House correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, former political editor of U.S. News & World Report: Think you're a loser just because you dropped out of high school and never finished Think you're a dud just because you work as a security guard even though you dreamed of becoming a global savior?the military training...

On an old building at 12 St. Marks Place, hovering above the sushi counters and tattoo parlors, is an inscription chiseled in the stone facade: Deutsch-Amerikanische Schützen Gesellschaft. It marks the location of the German-American Shooting Society clubhouse, long defunct, and is a rare vestige of the German immigrant community that dominated the East Village and the Lower East Side for much of the 19th century. Known as Kleindeutschland, or Little Germany, the community had German saloons and social clubs, German theaters and churches, German stores and workshops, and, of course, tens of thousands of German residents. Little Germany is...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has little tolerance for, well, a lot of things. But, as his latest book demonstrates, he holds a particular grievance against the mediocre, the safe middle ground, and most forms of moderation. True to form, Antifragile: Things that Gain From Disorder, is a work of non-fiction that trades in extremes—a book that, in complete earnestness, offers thoughts on everything from the philosophy of Seneca and the structure of the Swiss government to the value of procrastination and the limits of academic research. He is just as likely to bring in Ben Bernanke and Ralph Nader as Hammurabi...

As Romney says: Forewarned. What a dick move. It's such a dick move that a half hour ago, before I read this report, I was just thinking Romney should do it himself. Thor explains that Obama will trust in the media to carry his message of Complete and Total Domination In the Vote in order to keep conservatives, Tea Partiers, and America-loving libertarians home. Forewarned.

When members of the Democratic Party booed the inclusion of God and Jerusalem in their party platform this year, I thought of my parents. They would have been astounded. The immigrant family in which I grew up was, in the matter of politics, typical of the Jews of Boston in the 1930s and '40s. Of the two major parties, the Democrats were in those days the more supportive of Jewish causes. Indeed, only liberal politicians campaigned in our underprivileged neighborhood. Boston's Republicans, insofar as we knew them, were remote, wealthy elites ("Boston Brahmins"), some of whose fancy country clubs didn't...

Okay, Joe Biden did his part. Now, or soon, it’s Barack Obama’s turn again. If he flubs this like last time, this race is probably over. If he manages a draw, he’ll stay what he is now, the narrow favorite whose rickety lead is based chiefly on an edge in Ohio that doesn’t feel all that solid, and both sides will be sweating bullets right through election night. He has to win. And frankly, there’s reason to wonder whether he can. He’ll need to be on his toes on taxes and Medicare and health care, sure. But before all that,...

An analysis by a savvy demographer points to the states Romney is likely to take—and why he's on the path to victory. Sizing up population growth in key GOP states. The presidential race has grown closer since Mitt Romney and Barack Obama squared off in the first of three debates, with the Republican challenger edging ahead in the polls in several key states. But Romney never was the underdog depicted by the mainstream press, and Obama's path to victory is much steeper than his campaign team appreciates; they've long felt they have it in the bag. Former GOP demographer John...

The irony of ironies: The Biden-Ryan debate was more about foreign policy than the economy and jobs. Yet another irony: Paul Ryan, an expert on all things fiscal, disclosed a much better knowledge base of foreign policy than anyone thought existed. Shows how smart and well-rounded he really is. Mr. Ryan’s Benghazi slam, right out of the chute, won him the debate. This terrorist attack is going to be a huge presidential-race issue. Americans are furious at the Obama-Biden-Clinton stupidity and mismanagement surrounding the tragic Benghazi deaths. They are enraged at the Benghazi cover-up. Mr. Ryan accused Mr. Biden of...

Progressive opinions on Barack Obama’s first term are as conflicted as his record. These differences are a sign of a diverse and spirited left, and we welcome continued debate in our pages about the president’s record and policies. But that discussion should not obscure what is at stake in this election. A victory for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan in November would validate the reactionary extremists who have captured the Republican Party. It would represent the triumph of social Darwinism, the religious right, corporate power and the big money donors who thrive in a new Gilded Age of inequality. It...

When Anders Aslund, a Swedish economist who has studied and advised most of the leaders in the former Soviet Union, visited Kiev in late 2004, at the height of the Orange Revolution, he returned to his office in Washington, D.C., with a surprising observation. Most reports depicted the Orange Revolutionaries, with their determined, subzero encampment of the capital city's central square, either as western Ukrainians rebelling against the government's pro-Russian stance, or as idealistic students who were unwilling to stomach political repression. Both characterizations were true, but Aslund saw a third dynamic at play. The Orange Revolution, he told me,...

The buy-out industry is under attack for destroying jobs. Its returns to investors are the real problem IF STEVE SCHWARZMAN thought it was valid in 2010 to compare Barack Obama’s “war” against business to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, what can he be thinking now? Private-equity executives must be hoping the boss of Blackstone will keep his opinions to himself. More bad publicity is the last thing the industry needs. Other Republican presidential candidates are competing to see who can say the most damning thing about Mitt Romney’s career at Bain Capital. Newt Gingrich’s supporters have even made a sort of...

The machine guns roared, pouring tens of thousands of bullets into the night's blackness. Suddenly: Ka-WHOOOMP! WAAHHHMP! WHA-OOOOMP!! Enormous fireballs flashed into yellow-white existence, mutating into billows of orange flame 100 feet high. The pulse of shock and heat hit my skin. As the explosions faded, the night air was lit by an endless fusillade of red and green tracer rounds, the incandescent muzzle blast of automatic weapons, and flames from burning vehicles… Just a typical evening in the green autumn hills of north-central Kentucky. Typical twice a year, I should say. Every April and October, the Knob Creek Gun...

When Barack Obama secured his party's nomination for president in 2008, one group of Democrats had special reason to cheer. These were Democrats who were reliably liberal on policy but horrified by the party's sometimes knee-jerk animosity to faith. The low point may have been the 1992 Democratic convention. There the liberal but pro-life governor of Pennsylvania, Bob Casey Sr., was humiliated when he was denied a speaking slot while a pro-choice Republican activist from his home state was allowed. With Mr. Obama, all this looked to be in the past. In 2006, the Illinois senator delivered a speech declaring...

It’s well known that America’s dependence on foreign oil forces us to partner with some pretty unsavory regimes. Take, for instance, the country that provides by far the largest share of our petroleum imports. Its regime, in thrall to big oil interests, has grown increasingly bellicose, labeling environmental activists “radicals” and “terrorists” and is considering a crackdown on nonprofits that oppose its policies. It blames political dissent on the influence of “foreigners,” while steamrolling domestic opposition to oil projects bankrolled entirely by overseas investors. Meanwhile, its skyrocketing oil exports have sent the value of its currency soaring, enriching energy industry...

FOR eight seconds, we saw the president we had craved for three years: cool, joyous, funny, connected. “I, I’m so in love with you,” Barack Obama crooned to a thrilled crowd at a fund-raiser at the Apollo in Harlem on Thursday night, doing a seductive imitation as Al Green himself looked on. The song would make a good campaign anthem: “Let’s stay together, lovin’ you whether, whether times are good or bad, happy or sad.” Don’t break up, turn around and make up. Times have been bad and sad, and The One did not turn out to be a messiah,...

"At this point in my life," says Audrey, age 39, "I thought I'd be married with children." A native of southeast Washington, D.C., and the child of parents who are approaching their 50th wedding anniversary, Audrey seems like the proverbial "good catch"—smart, funny, well-educated, attractive. Audrey earns a good living, too, with an income from management consulting that far surpasses what her parents ever made. Her social life is busy as well, filled with family, friends and church. Only about one in 20 black women is interracially married; they are much less likely than black men to cross the race...

PHILADELPHIA — For years, state health officials missed some unsettling patterns at the three-story brick abortion clinic on Lancaster Avenue. It was always open late, way past the time the pizza place next door closed at midnight. The women who emerged from it — often poor blacks and Hispanics — appeared dazed and in pain, and sometimes left in ambulances. The doctor who ran the clinic, Kermit Gosnell, had been sued at least 15 times for malpractice. Two women died while under his care. But the dangerous practices went unnoticed, except by the women who experienced them. They were discovered...

AFP - When police officers arrived at 13-year-old Masha's home, searched her room and inspected her computer, it was not because they suspected her of any crime. Her offence was simply to be a devoted follower of the angst-ridden punk-rock subculture known as 'emo', in an ex-Soviet state where pressures to conform remain strong. "It was offensive and frightening at the same time," said Masha, a schoolgirl in the Armenian capital, clearly upset by the experience. Police in Yerevan have been conducting a campaign against the capital's small but controversial emo community since the recent suicides of two teenagers who...

Posted by Daniel J. Mitchell The Center for Immigration Studies recently put out a study arguing that immigration has had negative effects on California. One of their measures was a comparison of how many people in the state were receiving some form of welfare compared to other states. I found that data (see Table 3 of the report) very interesting, but not because of the immigration debate (I’ll leave others to debate that topic). Instead, I wanted to get a better understanding of the variations in government dependency. Is there a greater willingness to sign up for income redistribution programs,...

CHICAGO — Fashion and politics are seasonal and unpredictable, yet the two came together quite well here for the hometown designer Maria Pinto and Michelle Obama, whose first memorable bursts onto the national scene were often in Pinto creations. Remember the purple sheath Mrs. Obama wore the night of the fist bump heard round the world? The teal number at the Democratic National Convention? Or the red dress she wore to meet the Bushes on their way out of the White House? Maria Pinto all, designed right here where both women were born and raised and, over the course of...

Some days ago we wondered aloud at the blank check extended to Fannie and Freddie along with the suspiciously convenient timing of those announcements on Christmas Day. Back then we wondered if we had been told the entire story. To wit: So. Let us summarize: We do not expect the GSEs to grow their portfolios at all, so we are fixing the bloated portfolio problem by easing the portfolio caps to permit a quarter trillion dollar expansion thereof. We do not expect either of the GSEs to need more help from the Treasury, so we are responding to the underutilized...

It's a bit hard to believe, but that's what a Public Policy Polling survey suggests: that only half of Americans would rather have President Obama in the White House than his predecessor, while 44 percent would prefer George W. Bush to still be president. Here's PPP's Tom Jensen: "Perhaps the greatest measure of Obama's declining support is that just 50% of voters now say they prefer having him as President to George W. Bush, with 44% saying they'd rather have his predecessor. Given the horrendous approval ratings Bush showed during his final term that's somewhat of a surprise and an...

Introductory Remarks: On December 7, 1941, U.S. military installations at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii were attacked by the Imperial Japanese Navy. Could this tragic event that resulted in over 3,000 Americans killed and injured in a single two-hour attack have been averted? After 16 years of uncovering documents through the Freedom of Information Act, journalist and historian Robert Stinnett charges in his book, Day of Deceit, that U.S. government leaders at the highest level not only knew that a Japanese attack was imminent, but that they had deliberately engaged in policies intended to provoke the attack, in order to draw...

Former Republican Congresssman John Hostettler announced today he's launching a bid to challenge Indiana Senator Evan Bayh next year. Hostettler represented Indiana's 8th Congressional district for six terms from 1994 to 2006, eventually losing in a landslide to Democrat Brad Ellsworth.

Tacked to my wall is a lithograph of the famous Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington. For many years, it graced my mother's one-room schoolhouse in Lime Rock, N.Y. Antiquarian relic or enduringly relevant image? The same question may be asked of the "little red schoolhouse" itself, whose reality and legend are the subject of "Small Wonder." Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor at New York University, sets out to tell "how -- and why -- the little red schoolhouse became an American icon." Mr. Zimmerman proves a thoughtful and entertaining teacher. First, the chromatic debunking: One-room schools were often white and...

I recently attended a dinner with a group of prominent liberal and libertarian bloggers to see if there is a community of interest that might lead to closer cooperation on some issues. On the surface, there would appear to be potential for an alliance. Libertarians tend to be liberal on social issues, favoring such things as gay marriage and drug legalization; and also liberal on defense and foreign policy, opposing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and opposing torture and restrictions on civil liberties in the name of national security. But libertarians are conservative on economic policy--favoring a free market...

LONDON (MarketWatch) -- Less than a minute into his presidency, Barack Obama committed his first gaffe. The new president of the United States said in his inaugural address that "Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath." That's wrong. Forty-three Americans, including Obama, have taken the oath of office. One president, Grover Cleveland, served two terms, separated by Benjamin Harrison's. Cleveland is counted as both the 22nd and the 24th president. (To be fair, Cleveland was probably big enough to count as two separate people, judging by the paintings.) It was a small mistake, and one a swooning press will...

I'm thrilled by the election of Barack Obama, and I don't want to miss a word he says. In fact, all the days since Nov. 4 have seemed a bit like Christmas morning, waking to his mellifluous voice that reveals yet another distinguished individual picked to head an operation that he or she is supremely qualified to lead and is not intent on undermining. "You're acting like a groupie," says my husband. But for an ad person and former copywriter, it is especially thrilling to go from a guy who wielded the English language like a hacksaw to a real...

Martin Weiss writes: The Fed, the Treasury and all major governments on the planet are throwing the kitchen sink at this debt crisis. But their efforts are being overwhelmed by a monumental sea change — the shift from rising prices to falling prices, from booming asset values to crashing asset values, from wealth creation to wealth destruction , from inflation to deflation. For my entire lifetime, and probably yours as well, we have been living with inflation — sometimes tame, sometimes rampant — but consistently eroding the purchasing power of our dollar. Inflation pervaded every money decision we made or...

Now this might seem churlish when the UK bank bailout scheme is being hailed as a bold attempt to backstop the UK financial system, but let's spend a moment thinking about the bigger consequences. Unlike the US TARP which will relieve the banks of toxic assets on their balance sheets, this UK plan will put the government in the boardroom of every participating bank (figuratively if not literally). Can anyone tell me now what really separates the banks from the government? Our liberal, equity-owning democracy has taken a major blow. With this precedent what incentive is there now for me...

In Washington over the last week, there were lots of ideas about what a bailout of Wall Street ought to look like. But none had less chance of becoming law than the plan put out by the core of the House GOP caucus, the conservatives known as the Republican Study Committee. The members of this group (which has more than its share of extremists and buffoons) offered as the cure to our current woes the removal of regulations on businesses and a suspension of the capital-gains tax, as though they were the congressional equivalent of those Japanese soldiers hunkered down...

The US Senate Saturday approved 25 billion dollars in loan guarantees for the financially strapped US auto industry, intended to spark a wave of automotive innovation. The loan guarantees were included in a continuing resolution that included funding for the US government and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. President George W. Bush has indicated that he intends to sign the bill. "We're very pleased Congress has chosen to act at this critical time," said Greg Martin, director of communications for General Motors Corp's Washington office. GM had been subject of much speculation that it could be forced into bankruptcy....

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Reserve Primary Fund, a money-market mutual fund whose assets have tumbled 65 percent in recent weeks, fell below $1 a share in net asset value, because of its losses on debt issued by Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. (LEH.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz). In the industry, money funds whose net assets drop below $1 a share are said to have "broken the buck". The Reserve Primary Fund had about $23 billion in assets on Tuesday, down from about $65 billion in assets as of August 31, said fund spokesman Ming Lee Hatch. Investor redemptions will be...